Springfield has spent decades speaking openly about his career, his depression, and his marriage. His wife almost never has. With their wedding anniversary falling this October, here’s what’s actually confirmed about Barbara Porter, and what still isn’t.
A photograph from February 1982 shows Rick Springfield at a table inside The Bistro in Los Angeles, at the afterparty for that year’s Grammy Awards. He’s sitting with his mother and a young woman he’d been seeing for about two years, Barbara Porter. He’d just won Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male, for “Jessie’s Girl,” a song about wanting a girl he couldn’t have. Porter was a few feet away when he won it.
She wasn’t the girl in the song. She’s said so herself, at least once, and only in words her husband repeated for her. In more than forty years of interviews about their marriage, that may be the closest thing to a direct quote from her that exists anywhere in print.
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The story he keeps telling
Springfield has told the story of how he met his wife the same way for years. Every published version reads close to word for word. In one widely quoted People interview, he described an English manager introducing them at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, where Porter worked reception. She was 15. He thought she looked like a “mini Brigitte Bardot” and told himself she was too young. Nothing came of it.
They crossed paths again a few years later, once Springfield had split from another girlfriend and returned to Sound City to record Working Class Dog, the album that carried “Jessie’s Girl” to number one. Porter was 18 by then. He called her office and asked her out.
They married on 27 October 1984, at his family’s church in Australia. Their sons, Liam and Joshua, followed in 1985 and 1989. Liam later worked alongside his father on General Hospital. Joshua has been studying to become a child therapist.
What’s actually confirmed
Search for Porter online and the facts get shaky fast. Various sites list at least three different birth years for her, describe a modelling career that doesn’t appear anywhere in the actual record, and one even claims she and Springfield divorced in 2007. None of that holds up. Springfield and Porter have married once, to each other, in 1984, and there’s no record of a divorce, then or since. Porter has never had a confirmed public birth date. The most recent celebrity press estimate, from a People piece in early 2025, put her at 61, which would put her in her early sixties today.
Not Jessie’s girl
Because Porter reappeared in Springfield’s life right as “Jessie’s Girl” was being recorded, people have assumed for decades that the song was written about her. It wasn’t. Springfield has said, in an interview with Fox News, that the song came from a woman he barely knew, from a stained glass class, whose real boyfriend was called Gary, not Jessie. Porter has had to answer for the mix-up for most of her adult life. Her response, relayed by her husband:
“No, it’s not me. I didn’t know him back then.”
The detail that doesn’t sound rehearsed
That meeting story is polished. Something Springfield mentioned almost in passing this year sounds nothing like it. He became a US citizen in 2006, and part of the reason was practical: he wanted Porter to be able to handle his finances and legal affairs without complication if he died before she did. It isn’t a line built for effect, and it barely counts as an anecdote.
What he hasn’t repeated
Springfield has built part of his public identity on being open. His 2010 memoir, Late, Late at Night, discussed depression and infidelity during the marriage in plain terms, and made the New York Times bestseller list. He has talked about that book often since. There’s one thing he hasn’t gone back to. In an earlier interview with Songfacts, he said his 2004 album Shock/Denial/Anger/Acceptance came out of having nearly divorced Porter, and that the two of them worked through it. Some longtime listeners read the lyrics differently. To them, the record sounds like the fallout of an affair that ended on its own, not a direct account of the marriage. Springfield hasn’t clarified, in anything on record, which reading is closer to what actually happened.
It’s possible none of this means much. Public figures repeat their best stories because retelling is easier than remembering, and reading intention into which anecdotes survive can just be a writer’s habit. That’s a fair objection. But the near-divorce isn’t a new detail he’s simply never been asked to expand on. He’s given interviews about the marriage steadily since at least 2021, including at length about the memoir’s harder material. He hasn’t brought up the near-divorce again in any of them. What’s smoothing down into a repeatable story and what’s staying a single sentence doesn’t look random.
Springfield turned 77 yesterday and played a show that evening in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, one of more than sixty dates he played last year alone. Asked last month how the marriage has lasted when so many in his industry don’t, he gave a version of the answer he’s given for years: “She’s the reason we’re together. She’s the best person I’ve ever known… when people ask, ‘How come you’re still together?’ I say, ‘Don’t get divorced, work through it.'”
What Porter would say to the same question, in her own words, still isn’t on record anywhere.
